I know all about common names. I have heard all the jokes, as had my father, a unique and remarkable man named Bob Smith. Unfortunately, common names like ours are just one of many problems that will face Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach in his new role as co-chair of President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission.

That we want it to be so does not make it so. Truth is not so friendly. But that’s a big problem today. We have “filter-bubble” chat rooms, echo chamber television networks, algorithms that anticipate the images we want, and politicians ever so willing to pander to our philosophical predilections. So how are we supposed to know what’s true and what’s not?

Leaving aside the question as to whether there was actual collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election, it is undisputed that candidate Donald Trump was eager for a friendship between our two nations. The most recent accounts of the president seeking out more one-on-one time with Putin at the G-20 dinner — using only a Russian translator — is the latest evidence that this enthusiasm is undiminished.

President Donald Trump may not yet have built his “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border or figured out a way to make Mexico pay for it, but immigration is one area where the president seems committed to keeping his campaign promises.

On July 6 Sen. Jerry Moran temporarily embraced boldness after a town hall meeting in Palco, Kan. Our junior senator met hundreds of constituents to discuss the health care experiences of real people from all across the state. Rural and urban hospital administrators came to argue for Medicaid funding, and he got an earful from a western Kansas doctor who once provided care to the senator’s children.

One cannot imagine a more wrenching moral dilemma than the case of little Charlie Gard. He is a beautiful 11-month-old boy with an incurable genetic disease. It depletes his cells’ energy-producing structures (the mitochondria), thereby progressively ravaging his organs. He cannot hear, he cannot see, he can barely open his eyes. He cannot swallow, he cannot move, he cannot breathe on his own. He suffers from severe epilepsy and his brain is seriously damaged. Doctors aren’t even sure whether he can feel pain.

Syria adds another chapter to the star-crossed history of CIA paramilitary action. These efforts begin with the worthy objective of giving presidents policy options short of all-out war. But they often end with an untidy mess, in which rebels feel they have been “seduced and abandoned” by the promise of U.S. support that disappears when the political winds change.

It is said that America’s armed forces have been stressed by 16 years of constant warfare, the longest such in the nation’s history. For the Air Force, however, the high tempo of combat operations began 26 years ago, with enforcement of the no-fly zone in Iraq after Desert Storm. With an acute pilot shortage, particularly in the fighter pilot community, and with a shortfall approaching 4,000 among maintenance and staffing personnel, the service is, as Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson says, “too small for what the nation expects of it.”

It began in April. That’s when there appeared on YouTube an NRA recruitment video that raised eyebrows across the political spectrum. Speaking through a jaw clenched tight enough to crack walnuts, with an intensity that suggested a major artery might blow out at any second, conservative pundit Dana Loesch described an America wracked by carnage.